This evening's choir concert, I think, went well. I was nervous at first since I couldn't make last week's rehearsal, but I really enjoyed it! I'm quite hooked on choir at this point. [Older son, you can stop grinning now!][He predicted this would happen.]

...The U.S. economy wastes 55 percent of the energy it consumes, and
while American companies have ruthlessly wrung out other forms of
inefficiency, that figure hasn’t changed much in recent decades. The
amount lost by electric utilities alone could power all of Japan.

A 2005 report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found
that U.S. industry could profitably recycle enough waste
energy—including steam, furnace gases, heat, and pressure—to reduce the
country’s fossil-fuel use (and greenhouse-gas emissions) by nearly a
fifth. A 2007 study by the Mc­Kinsey Global Institute sounded largely
the same note; it concluded that domestic industry could use 19 percent
less energy than it does today—and make more money as a result...

Now, some colleges are crossing the final threshold, allowing men
and women to share rooms. At the urging of student activists, more than
30 campuses across the country have adopted what colleges call
gender-neutral rooming assignments, almost half of them within the past
two years.

Once limited to such socially liberal bastions as
Hampshire College, Wesleyan University, and Oberlin College,
mixed-gender housing has edged into the mainstream, although only a
small fraction of students have taken advantage of the new policies so
far...

When we reported last week that Forgetting Sarah Marshall director Nick Stoller and writer/star Jason Segel had signed on to develop the next Muppet movie, I speculated that these would be the guys to get it right (”The early Muppet films were absolutely genius, but the last few failed due to an attempt to
dumb down the plot/jokes to appeal to young viewers”). Segel spoke with
MTV, and his views seemed to mirror my early thoughts.

“I’ve just grown a little disappointed with ‘Muppets in the Old West,’ ‘Muppets Under Water,’ and all these weird concept movies.
I just want to go take it back to the early 80’s, when it was about the
Muppets trying to put on a show. That’s what I’m trying to bring back,”
said Segel, who also wants to bring back the big name cameos of the
earlier films...“I remember thinking that Kermit was the original Tom Hanks - he was the everyman for a kid. I remember watching Kermit and
thinking ‘That’s what I want to do when I grow up.’ I don’t think I
realized he was a puppet...”

I approve!

In everything that I've read about Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, I haven't read about how the changes upstream contributed to New Orleans' problems. From Who should pay to protect New Orleans:

...These costs are a federal responsibility because benefits to the entire
nation, including massive engineering projects built in, and providing
direct benefit to, states as far away as North Dakota, have in the last
60 years transformed New Orleans from a city reasonably safe from
hurricanes to one dangerously vulnerable to them. These projects have
had an effect as great as sending saboteurs from 1,500 miles away to
dynamite Louisiana's levees.

That
analogy may sound like an overstatement, but it may be an
understatement. To understand the link between the High Plains and
Louisiana, one has to understand the Mississippi River system -- which
stretches from New York to Idaho and drains 31 states -- and the
sediment load the system carries. This sediment load was so great that
it changed the nation's geography. Sixty million years ago, the ocean
reached north to Cape Girardeau, Mo., but as the sea level fell, the
river dropped enough mud into what geologists call the Mississippi
Embayment to create all the land from Cape Girardeau to the sea, a
total of 35,000 square miles in seven states.

That
land-building process created Louisiana's coast, along with barrier
islands that provided a buffer protecting populated areas in Louisiana
and part of Mississippi's coast.

Human engineering has reversed
that process, causing the loss of roughly 2,000 square miles of land
since World War II. If this buffer -- equivalent to the state of
Delaware -- had not been destroyed, New Orleans would need little other
hurricane protection.

Numerous man-made actions have caused the land loss, but the most
important, yet least recognized, may be the decline of sediment in the
river. Dams built to provide electricity, irrigation and flood
protection in the Upper Midwest and High Plains are largely responsible
for the decline; sediment level is now only 30% to 40% of the natural
amount. A particular problem has been a series of dams on the upper
Missouri River beginning above Bismarck, N.D., and ending above
Yankton, S.D. Historically, roughly half of the total sediment load in
the Mississippi River came from the upper Missouri, but the dams
trapped that sediment upstream. According to the U.S. Geological
Survey, since the dams' construction in the 1950s, "the discharge of
sediment from the upper Missouri River basin virtually was stopped."

[If you don't want to read about dinosaur digestion, I'll have a spring flowers post tomorrow.]

In my Sex and Violence post, while discussing Jurassic Park (right), I mentioned the wet inside of a Tyrannosaurus' mouth. Today, at dinner, I started wondering if that is the case. Do all creatures have saliva? Tyrannosaurs had teeth but not for chewing. How did their digestion work?

Both birds and dinosaurs are designed to ingest food in relatively
large pieces that are processed internally. Mechanical reduction in
the mouth (chewing) is very rare in birds. The best examples occur in
cuckoos, hoatzins, and turacos. The teeth of dinosaurs suggest that
chewing was limited to a few groups of plant-eaters. Both dinosaurs and
birds ingest rocks or grit to assist with mechanical reduction. The
saliva of birds lacks digestive enzymes and chemical reduction
(digestion) is wholly internal. The properties of dinosaur saliva are
unknown.

If this is correct, then my post probably was fine. It's not all that easy to find information on Tyrannosaur digestion. Most webpages have more about the digestive systems of herbivorous dinosaurs, but they focus on the food gathering habits of the carnivores, usually with words like "rending" and "slashing."

Erickson was pleased to see that the coprolite corroborated his previous ideas that the shearing teeth of tyrannosaurs pulverized bone as they bit down on huge hunks of meat. Though the coprolite reveals that much bone passed through the guts undigested, other rounded pieces were partly dissolved by strong stomach acids, so the predator may have obtained nutrients from the prey's skeleton. "It tells you about the physiology of these animals," says Erickson. "They could digest bone to some degree." Chin, though, remains impressed by how little bone digestion occurred, compared with how much crocodile dissolve swallowed bones.

By the way, if you google "Dinosaur spit," one of the most common results, mentioned while discussing the water cycle, goes something like this:

For movie buffs it might be interesting to note that a highly stylized dilophosaur
appeared in Jurassic Park as the frilled, poison spitting dinosaur that attacked
Nedry, the devious computer hack, at the bottom of the waterfall. The movie version is
rather misleading, however. Real dilophosaurs were larger than depicted in the movie, and
show no sign of having possessed a colorful, expandable fold of skin along the neck as does
the cinematic dilophosaur. Also, there is no evidence that they could spit poison.

Also, human saliva is 98% water so it really shouldn't seem all that gross. However, that knowledge doesn't change the way I feel.

For some strange reason, no one else wanted to discuss my question at dinner.

When we're hiking, I love finding traces of old, overgrown roads. BLDBLOG has an interesting post on Ancient Roads.

...The article
refers to one local, a lawyer, who explains that "he loved getting out
and looking for hints of ancient roads: parallel stone walls or rows of
old-growth trees about 50 feet apart. Old culverts are clues, too, as
are cellar holes that suggest people lived there; if so, a road
probably passed nearby."Think of it as landscape hermeneutics: hunting down traces of a disappeared landscape...

...if we bumped male requirements up to something as specific as the requirements for women, the US film and TV industry would lose all its leading men overnight
(just “underweight” wipes out the whole brigade, though I’m sure some
of them would be willing to starve if their careers were on the line).
And wouldn’t that be a pity for all those women, including me, who find
quite a few American lead actors attractive despite their “flaws”? Or
because of them?

...This week will undoubtedly witness a great deal of back and forth and
back again about Heston's politics, given that most people last saw him
not in character but at the podium of NRA rallies. But during his
career Heston was an actor who approached each role with deep
seriousness, repeatedly returning to the stage in between films until
the lines would no longer stay in his memory...

In a post about dating tall women at Megan McArdle's Blog, one commenter says (emphasis mine):

...assuming there is any talking to be done, act like size doesn't matter
much... what would you do differently if she was only 5'? There are
logistics differences in sweeping women off their feet, but making her
the only important being in the room covers most of them, IMHO.

...So even though lightning likes land, parts of the ocean receive frequent jolts.

What happens to the charge once the lightning makes contact with water? According to Don MacGorman, a physicist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma.

"Basically
lightning stays more on the surface of the water rather than
penetrating it. That's because water is a reasonably good conductor,
and a good conductor keeps most of the current on the surface."

So if I understand this correctly the surface is acting bit like the Gaussian surface of a Faraday cage.
How far this charge carries across the surface likely depends on
surface topography of the water, total power of the lightning,
temperature, salinity, etc. Thus to the original question: what about
the animals? If of course this is all true, and I know someone is out
there waiting to pounce on this, then unless an organism breaks the
surface it will not get electrocuted....

Hamjamser started out as dear husband's and older son's blog, but dear husband has moved on to Color Sweet Tooth, and older son (AKA Nigel Tangelo) has continued his wanderings around Hamjamser - a most unusual place. There are so many descriptive posts about the locales, flora, and fauna but here's a recent favorite:

I've been meaning to post this picture for a while now. This is my new
salamander, a gift from Lady Xeredile, straight from the palace
furnaces. Isn't it adorable? It sits on top of its lantern all day,
draped through the carrying ring to soak up sunlight, then crawls
inside and lights up at night. It's brighter than a torch and much
better behaved. I don't know how I did without it for so many years. I
seem to remember walking into things a lot.

The lamp's a bit
large for the salamander now, but it'll grow into it soon enough.
Salamanders never stop growing. Other than that, it's a perfect lantern
for a salamander. It's got windows made of the special insulated glass
found in the Earthmover, a nice wide chimney for air (lit salamanders
need lots of oxygen), and space for lots of coal or wood shavings in
case it gets hungry. Salamanders only eat every few weeks, but their
food needs to be good and flammable when they do. Mine seems very fond
of pencil shavings and smoked squid. Fortunately, I have lots of both.

My garden is graced by the presence of many birds - today a small
flock of cedar waxwings were scouting out the Savannah Holly tree that
is covered in red berries, two pairs of blue birds were checking out
the purple martin house - and herons seem to fly overhead everytime I
looked up. And has anyone else noticed how many hawks there are now?
I haven't checked into this - but I can't help but hypothesize that
their numbers are up. The garden will be loud with chatter - then
there will be cold silence. It is during the silences that I almost
always spot a hawk.

The kingfishers were racing down the tidal creek - all afternoon
long. I imagine that one of them is holding a stop watch, and shouting
'go' every few minutes.

Some interesting things I've found online lately (I've been putting this together for a while):

I moved this one to the top to encourage people to watch it. I'm not much for reality shows, but I had tears in my eyes after this. Watch it all the way through. And then watch it again and focus on the judges' reactions. [Hat tip to Intellectuelle]

...My paradigm shift for the way I viewed this show came during the scene in Wicked when
Dr. Dillamond -- the talking goat of a professor -- is teaching his
students, "Food grew scarce, people grew hungrier and angrier. And the
question became 'Whom can we blame?' Can anyone tell me what is meant
by the term 'Scapegoat'?"

"My God," I was thinking. "This is exactly what happened here in Germany..."

As
I was sitting there in my front row seat at Stuttgart's Palladium
Theater, the allegories to Nazi Germany were suddenly striking me like
thundering lightning bolts between the eyes...

Dear Abby,Late breaking news: I
am the MOTHER. That means you do what I say. That does not mean you
listen and then whine a little and then think it over and then cry and
then roll around on the floor and then stare at me balefully and then
wait until I start counting to three and THEN you do what I say. It
just means you do what I say.Love,The Tyrannical Being Who Is the Destroyer of All Fun P.S.: Don’t stick your tongue out at me. I can see you...

Jason Hare and Jeff (of Jefitoblog) are doing the 25 days of Mellowmass (click here). Every day, a new, and supremely kitschy, Christmas song for your amusement/bemusement. Here's their introduction:

You may recall a little series that Jeff and I undertook last December. It was entitled TheTwelveDaysOfMellowmas,
and it represented all that was both wonderful and awful about the
holidays. For twelve straight days, Jeff and I listened to some of the
worst holiday music imaginable - a different song each day - and shared
not only the song, but our live conversation with all of you.

The fundamental incongruity between the willful myth-making of
musicals (which we, like Richard Dyer, will take as the ideal-typical
exemplar of professionalized entertainment) and American society as a
whole is understood in terms of “escapism.” Everyone understood that
the world of the 1930s Hollywood musical and Depression America were
completely different, with the former an escape from the latter.
Marxists critics are more apt to see this as a bad thing and to value
art that “tells the truth” about society, while those in the
entertainment industry are apt to wave away all such concerns with
appeals to “entertainment”: both sides are indulging in a certain
ideology, and each ideology adopts its own strategy of self-protection.
As Gerald Mast points out, musicals always insist on their fluffiness,
their lack of substance—they protest, a little too much, that they are
“only entertainment,” which places them outside of critical argument
and into that realm protected by the words de gustibus non est disputandum.

But what this means, among other things, is that the audience for
the musical is an audience that is fully capable of understanding the
distance between the idealized world on the screen and their own lives.
The musical makes myth in an age when the act of making myth is fully
visible and fully understood for what it is

Reason Number One: “I want to be a marine biologist so that I can talk to dolphins.”

Believing this is simply the Kiss of Death. This is the verbal
equivalent of reaching down your throat, pulling out your own
intestines, wrapping them around your neck and choking yourself. When
we hear this our impulse is to thwack you a good one on your keester
with the frozen haddock we keep within arm’s reach just for this
occasion.

And why is that? It is because, and please listen carefully, while
you may want to talk to dolphins, dolphins do not want to talk to you.
That’s right. Mostly, dolphins want to eat fishes and have sex with
other dolphins. And that pretty much cuts you out of the loop, doesn’t
it? Oh, I know that there are the occasional dolphins that hang around
beaches, swim with humans and seem to be chummy, but these are the
exceptions. You don’t judge the whole human race by the people who
attend monster car rallies, do you?

Just be honest with yourself. If you want to talk to dolphins you
don’t want to be a biologist. What you really want to do is explore
your past lives, get in touch with the Cosmic Oneness and conduct
similar-minded individuals on tours to Central America looking for
evidence that We Are Not Alone. Our experience is that people who feel
this way last about 6.5 minutes in any biology program.

... But if the gods are in tune, Edna always will be played by a man. It's
part of the compact "Hairspray" makes with its audience. They know Edna
is a man and they accept that. The way they accept the black-white
teenage love story, and the idea that the fat girl can win the gorgeous
guy -- the whole show is about acceptance, acceptance of who you are
and who the other guy is. That's what makes "Hairspray" the
all-American show it is. And I'll smack you upside the head with my big
fake boobs if you say otherwise.

Today the Natural History Museum proudly announced the launch of the first online database catalogue of the world's cockroaches:

You may be surprised at the variety - there are about 4500 species of
cockroach. They range from the world's smallest, which is three
millimetres long, to the world's heaviest, the Australian rhinoceros cockroach, which weighs as much as three adult blue tits.

...I've had plenty land on me as I sat in the middle of the lek, and I
still get creeped out when they settle on my back where I can't see
them. Cicada killers are truly frightening to folks who don't know what
they are, but rest assured for all their size and hectic activity, they
are wussies...